Not all browsers support gzip, mainly older ones. Some browsers that claim to support gzip have bugs (e.g. IE5.5 without the hotfix) that cause page loading to fail or worse. The W3C server would therefore have to "sniff" the requests to avoid causing problems for a subset of the global community. I'm not sure if the hotfix can be detected in a HTTP request so we'd have to take the safest line and not deliver gzip to any of these browsers, fixed or otherwise. Even some of the newer browsers have problems with gzip.
Compression would also increase the processing overhead a little, though caching could help here.
So, while I think the proposal has merit, we need to be cautious that we don't detach a portion of the world who are struggling with old and/or buggy browser implementations. W3C is global, after all.
---Rotan
-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-ac-forum-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-ac-forum-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of FinanzNachrichten.de, Markus Meister
Sent: 04 August 2009 11:29
To: site-comments@w3.org; w3c-ac-forum@w3.org
Subject: compression of HTML would save a lot of money
Dear Ian,
I have just noticed that we don't use HTML compression on our W3C website.
If we would use e.g. GZIP, we could save a lot of traffic and money.
3 examples:
http://www.w3.org/ 46 kB
http://lists.w3.org/ 227 kB
http://validator.w3.org/ 27 kB
I have just put these three html files on our test server and the result
confirmed that if we would deliver compressed files, the size would somewhat
smaller and we could reduce our costs by saving cash:
* homepage compressed: 14 kB (-70 % traffic)
* lists homepage compressed: 23 kB (-90 % traffic)
* validator homepage compressed: 5 kB (-81 % traffic)
Looking at our financial situation, it would be phantastic if you could
reduce our traffic expenses by maybe -50 % (graphics would not be concerned
by a compression).
If there are no 'political' reasons why it's not possible for us to use
compression, please check this idea with the server responsible.
When the traffic numbers are still around the same as last year (when I
proposed advertising to increase our revenues) I would guess that we could
save as much traffic costs that we economize a 5 digit Euro/USD amount per
year with compression.
Best regards,
FINANZNACHRICHTEN.DE
Markus Meister
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